Life goes on

The election is over, the passion is spent, and life resumes its normal course. I don’t foresee an imminent financial apocalypse, although I do see hard times ahead. We won’t be Greece. We’ll be England in those drab years between WWII and Margaret Thatcher. The real question is whether Americans will wait 35 years to change a dreary, downtrodden status quo, or if they’ll quickly rise up again before they’ve lost all memory of the America that was, rather than the America that is.

I’m working hard behind the scenes to come up with ideas to shift the paradigm. Other than that, I’m acknowledging that I have no control over what happens now. I need to keep my passion and drive, and I need to avoid anger, which will only exhaust and depress me, even as it slows my ability to move forward to solutions for my own economic situation (which I expect to worsen in coming years) and for the national well-being.

I think I need to plug in more into the world around me. Preaching to an intelligent choir is immensely satisfying, but we now know that it creates for conservatives precisely the same bubble we sneered at Manhattan and Hollywood for having. It turns out that their bubble was stronger than ours. I won’t blog less; I’ll just pay attention more.

Until people start to believe in something strong enough that they will either die or kill for it, the Left will never be gone from the American Throne in DC. Never. Ever.

SADIE

If we become Europe, where will Europeans flock to?

Michael Adams

Rush Limbaugh said something brilliant on Friday. I know it was brilliant because I said it on Wednesday. He and I say we should give the Lefties all that they want, in taxes and regulation, anyway. I’d still hold out on Civil Liberties issues. They’ll surely move for “enforced civility” on talk radio, blogs, and any other fora that bother them. They’ll still move to limit the right to keep and bear arms, and they’ll try to force the Catholic Church and others to pay for abortions. We can also try, in the states still in our control, to reform voting. The stories emerging now, about the huge amount of voter fraud in Florida, Pennsylvania and Ohio ought to0 be a warning to us. O’Guy will put another Communist on the Supreme Court at his first opportunity, so we’ll need to act fast. That also goes for the remaining court challenges to the health care abomination.

There’s another thing I would not give them. Immigration amnesty. We do not need to import more poor people.This is a chance to try, once again, to say that people with no marketable job skills are poor, regardless of race, color or national origin, and people with marketable job skills are not poor, regardless of color. Of course there is still discrimination in hiring. I have been rejected for two nursing jobs because I was straight. It’s OK. I have a skill for which there is a demand, so I got another, and better, job. Importing unskilled labor is exploitation. Shout it out loud. This is a lethal mutation in the Marxist paradigm. Pass it on!

However, if we let the dimocrats spend us into oblivion, while we’ll all suffer, we’ll eventually be able to say, as Lady Thatcher (whom may God save)did, “Labor isn’t working.”Fighting the gimme’s like Obamacare, which keeps them from becoming entrenched, but letting them do all that class warfare stuff, which can come to be seen, as it should be, as a war on prosperity, is Montessori for grownups.

Mike Devx

Does anyone have any links to a summary of results of the 2012 elections WITHIN States? Governors, legislatures, mayors, etc? I haven’t seen any such stories. Nor have my web searches yielded any results. Because of such lack of news, I’m assuming nothing significant changed in any way, but I’d like to know.

Book, you may be done for a while reacting to politics, but I don’t think politics is done with reacting to you. 😉
I think Mr. Obama is going to outrage you repeatedly over the next few years, just as he has done so in the prior four. You will become energized again at the egregious, horrifying violations of conservatism that he will be throwing in your face. Barack Obama is not going to change. He is not suddenly going to start governing prudently nor wisely, nor from the center.

I said I wasn’t going to comment much in the next few weeks on “the way to go forward” for conservatism; that I had too much to think about and internally debate with myself.

But I have already decided that this was a “kick the can down the road” election. We thought this was going to be the election where the Statist crowd got soundly rejected by Americans. We expected blow-the-roof-off GOP enthusiasm, dejected and listless support for leftism, and a movement among the middle of the road independents towards conservatism. None of that happened. A lot of conservatives or GOP voters stayed home. Among the left and among independents, though there is more worry and concern, there wasn’t enough. Too many of them voted for four more years. Quite simply, the big shift did not occur, the kind of shift that would have signaled a mandate for a significant change in direction.

We may find in the long run that four more years of Obama is *exactly* what the country needs to clarify the direction we need to go. We may actually (in the long run) have gotten lucky this year. Yes, ObamaCare will become entrenched and almost impossible to dislodge. Our fiscal crises will escalate. But I’ve always said the American people are slow to rouse. Perhaps they simply have not seen ENOUGH yet. Another four years of leftist, Statist policy may be what is needed.

Romney ran a perfectly fine campaign on the economy, but he was no conservative happy warrior like Reagan. Remember that Reagan was a solid spokesman for conservatism by 1964, and honed his message and his politics repeatedly over the next SIXTEEN years before he became president in 1980. Romney in 2012 wasn’t even Reagan in 1964, let alone Reagan in 1980. There isn’t anyone I see out there right now who is ready to be that kind of a conservative happy warrior, AND with tough political experience honed over years, ready to run for President.

Another way in which we may have avoided disaster: Romney ran as Mr. Technocrat Fix The Economy. He ran on competence and know-how. Yet in his campaign, the one area where such competence and know-how was absolutely required was in the GOTV (Get Out The Vote) effort. His campaign instituted a new, highly sophisticated hi-tech operation for GOTV called “Orca”. Competence? Know-How? It was a spectacular failure at every level. Obama never failed at anything as completely as the Romney campaign’s “Orca” GOTV progran failed. It was incompetence at a breathtaking, shocking level. As signals go, it is very troubling, and might have indicated what a “competence” level disaster a Romney presidency might have been.

I will add that the analysis of the Orca failure is still early, so there could be misinformation there. But in sum, the American people voting to simmer in four more years of Obama and his overwhelming statism, and the avoidance of a potentially disastrous Romney presidency, might be fortunate for our country in the long run.

Charles Martel

Mike Adams says we should accede to the left’s demands on the economy but not give ground on civil liberties.

Frankly, I don’t see that there are any protections left for us in the arena of civil liberties. The Supreme Court will soon be dominated by clueless Kagan and Sotomayor social-justice types, and the federal and state court systems in many instances have been taken over by progressive hacks. The lack of an outcry against voter fraud in the November 4 election tells us that the legal system in great swaths of the country has been Mafia-ized.

Still, St. Alinsky has some things to tell us. You don’t have to win all that many battles to win the war—or at least sap the foe’s willingness to pursue it so briskly. Among the things we can do:

—Massive Galting. The creation of an off-the-book underground economy is something Americans have always been good at. The Net has plenty of places to go that give sound advice on ways to get off the grid and withdraw financial support from the beast. Starve Leviathan. It can’t eat printed money forever.

—Massive civil disobedience. The first great wave of civil disobedience probably will come when Obama renews his war on the Catholic Church. The Church will respond by closing down its medical facilities, which account for roughly 33 percent of this country’s healthcare. That will give the feds an opening to expropriate Church properties in the name of some nebulous national good that most Americans will swallow. But even if a mere 1 percent of U.S. Catholics—700,000 people—were willing to use their bodies to block a federal takeover of the Catholic health system, that’s going to play havoc with the feds. Where to put all those bodies? How to beat the s**t out of them without videos of it going viral?

(The drawback is that the need to incarcerate tens of thousands of people will kick the door wide open for giant federal holding pens—what the Nazis and Russians used to call concentration camps.)

—At the same time, overwhelm the justice system with lawsuits as well as bodies. Ask people like the Koch brothers to help finance a massive legal fund that will challenge on all fronts, from defending civil disobedience cases to suing blue cities for financial misfeasance to forcing attention on the racism inherent in affirmative action by setting up Scopes-like trials to test it. (Get some willing souls to publicly declare that they will not hire blacks or Hispanics who hold degrees from such prestigious universities as Harvard, UC Berkeley, Duke, etc., on the grounds that they are not qualified. The discovery process will be a hoot as the plaintiffs scramble to show how the kids they admitted solely on the basis of complexion were actually qualified in any other respect to take on the academic demands of those schools.)

—Also use the “Koch Fund” to subsidize computer whizzes who can create hacks we might have to use at some point to gum up government surveillance. We should be prepared to wage cyber war, and we should be looking to nerds and military vets who can help the effort should we ever need to make it.

—In college, out-Alinsky the politically correct by infiltrating Marxist, Muslim, anti-Semitic, and homosexualist campus groups with orthodox Jews and Christians who will vie for leadership positions and shout to the rooftops when the groups claim they have the right to determine what their members should believe. When the groups assert that right, sue the hell out of them. Gum up the effin’ bureaucratic works.

—Encourage the creation of a League of Red States, which will collaborate with one another tactically and financially to defend states’ rights against the federal government.

Mike Devx

Ah, Charles Martel, that is the kind of “culture war” I could happily and enthusiastically participate in! All of your tactics and strategies are tried-and-true and have worked for the leftist Statists. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

And the list you thoughtfully provided for us in #6? My God, really, it’s just for STARTERS. Just soppopse we all got serious about the culture war, and engaged on this level. Rather than expecting our Washington “GOP Overlords” to do all the work for us – when in reality they are happy living within the Big Government Leviathan and they have no real motive to actually change anything in our favor…

I think it would be fun to leave the politics and the voting behind, and focus instead on the culture war itself, and take it to them. If this ever got off the ground, gained momentum, and started rolling… in my best slacker impression let me just say, “Wow. Dude.”

SADIE

Mike Devx – go to Politico 2012 for state results.

JKB

I think the important thing is to accept that logic isn’t something useful when talking with the Left. But it does require resolve to keep your own wits when they so vehemently make such crazy claims. And they usually run in packs.

Of course, the way to stay sane is to apply critical thinking beforehand so that you firm in your facts and aware of their crazy ideas.

Today, I read this very good explanation as to why we are always 40-60 years from running out of oil or some mineral or metal. Seems we are always running out because we only look that far out. It’s expensive to do the geologic work so extra work isn’t funded. There is dirt and after we find something useful in it, it become “ore” but the dirt we cast aside today may be the ore of tomorrow. We may go back to extract some new element or we may simply have new techniques to extract an old element.

We all know they exercised regularly, had no chemicals, little pollution and ate organic food. And were all dead by 35. We have all of the chemicals, lots of pollution, eat polluted chemical muck and live into our late 70s. But here’s the fascinating fact:

The bulk of this mortality reduction has occurred since 1900 and has been experienced by only about 4 of the roughly 8,000 human generations that have ever lived.

In a little-noticed footnote to last week’s election, state legislature elections this year have produced the highest number of states with one-party rule in 60 years. Democrats or Republicans now have sole control of the governorship and both legislative chambers in 37 state capitals around the country.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL), which tracks party representation in the country’s 50 state governments, Democrats now control all three bases of power – the governorship and both houses of the state legislature
– in 14 states and Republicans in 23, with only 12 states sharing power.

A further very gentle correction, if I may. They were not “all dead by age thirty five.” That is an average, and the average is brought down severely when you have a high infant mortality rate and a high childhood death rate.After the age of five, you had a fair chance of making it to sixty, when pneumonia would get you. That’s still the standard in what is called the third world. Most people in England, at the start of the nineteenth century, lived in what is now described as third-world poverty. That included polluted drinking water, so they had frequent diarrhea and sporadic outbreaks of cholera. That change is what capitalism hath wrought.

Oh, yeah, if you read A Christmas Carol this year, take a note of the glasses the Cratchet family shared. Nothing to do with infant mortality, but pretty typical third world.

Chuck Hammer,

Civil liberties protection is the work of masses of citizens, even unarmed ones, although armed is better, which is why tyrants like to disarm the populace. This dovetails with your mention of massive civil disobedience. As for an underground economy, we both know, without mentioning details here, that we have already got a bit of that, and third-world kleptocracies have tons and tons of it.

If each one of us can convert a non conservative into a conservative over the next 2-4 years, we will be fine. The appeal needs to be based on our ideas and ideals, our reasons and logic, rather than based on any particular candidate. Start with a conversational tone rather than a confrontational one, so they understand why they should and why we are conservatives.

This reminds me of back when the Japanese Emperor had divine right of rule, yet the military generals had 100% of the actual physical power. To the point where if the Emperor didn’t do as the Shogun wished, the funds for the Imperial Palace would be cut off and they would be put on short rations, going soon into starvation. Thus even if the US Constitution had rights such as freedom of speech and expression/belief, plus the 2nd Amendment’s armed self protection force, what good would it do in the end when the Left controls the purse and the money?

How many Americans will willingly defy the Leftist edicts at the cost of their jobs, their family, and their friends? Judging by the election, less than 51%.

Beth

Ymarsakar–I agree with your last question/answer. How many conservatives send their kids to public schools and then RAIL at the local populace how we need to pass bond issues to keep our schools running? How many conservatives will find every loop hole to sell mom and dad’s house/estate and then put them in the nursing home with the government picking up the tab? How many other government funded organizations do we happily use/support on a daily basis–libraries, museums, senior centers, latch-key programs, head-start programs, etc, etc, etc,? When will the conservative not only speak out against these things but also walk-out of them as well?

JKB

Michael Adams,

That is a quote an apparently to out of context. Preceding the quoted material the author was speaking of hunter-gatherers. The comparison is between them and current humans. The author then uses a quote from a referenced text in the 2nd paragraph I quoted. I had no idea how to offset the quote within a quote.

Our sainted Progressives would have us return not to 1900 but to hunter-gatherer times. We are separated further from our hunter-gatherer ancestors than they were from other hunter-gatherer species.

We live, and few alive today have any prior experience, in a time of great surplus. A surplus not brought by the whim of weather or deity but by “this strange trio, the capitalism/markets/industry thing,”. And I cannot help but remember, the USSR had the industry thing but they also often had great period of, shall we say, less than surplus. I would posit this was because they lacked industriousness. So I must lean toward the capitalism/markets thing as “the only economic system that has ever produced a consistent surplus over and above subsistence for the average person.”

The author of the piece states, “Not even the most miserablist Marxist would claim that we all live longer so that we’ve longer to be oppressed by the capitalists.” Which is true of course. Private ownership of the means of production is the default condition of humans and markets of a sort will develop. It is industry, both capital stock and industriousness, devotion to a pursuit that lights the powder. That propels the individual to produce a surplus separate from the vagaries of fortune. Which makes it all the more odd that the Left seeks to destroy “industry”. Making investments for future pay more risky and making reward for industrious sacrifice now less certain through rhetoric and policies to extract the surplus for themselves, even as they add no value. And we mustn’t ignore their attack on the root by inducing, shall we say, a deficit of industriousness in the populace.

Danny Lemieux

I disagree that we will become like Britain, I believe that we are about to become Argentina, where one of the world’s wealthiest nations died the dead of thousands of economic cuts in the hands of populist albeit clueless and avaricious dictators.

Mike Adams – I totally disagree with Rush Limbaugh on this – he believes the American people will wake up in the face of a crisis – I am not so sure. I believe that far too many will look to government with helpless looks on their faces. I really believe that too many people have been mesmerized with the bread and circuses of popular media to have a clue about what is going on. This is what makes them easy prey – the only thing that will wake them up is a real crisis. What we need to be sure to do is make sure that the finger of blame points squarely at those responsible and that Democrat demagogues are exposed for what they are.

The good news, however, is that conservatives cannot be marginalized. This is still a 50:50 country. Let conservatives’ values take root and succeed at the grass roots levels (communities, states) and prove their success. We need to be in position when the financial calamity does strike …and it will strike.

I was just at an overseas business meeting where I had final confirmation on a financial trend that I have seen happen this year that is having devastating (albeit unreported) effects on small and medium business. Apparently, Dodd-Frank Regulations have given regulators the authority to force banks to cut funding to capital enterprises, no matter how profitable those loans, and force them to buy treasury bonds instead. I have had three company financial reports put on my desk of companies that need to be sold because their bank access was cut off with no good explanation given.
What this does is two things:

1) it takes capital out of the productive, tax-revenue generating marketplace and redirects it to non-productive U.S. treasury debt repayment.

2) it makes sure that the banks will be taken down when the values of their treasury holdings collapse.

Danny Lemieux

Incidentally, as far as I am concerned, the line in the sand was crossed this election cycle: I am through overlooking the vicious demagoguery of the Democrat Left and will call them out on it at every opportunity.

The line was probably crossed in the last presidential election, when they went after Sarah Palin’s kids.

SADIE

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Two comments I read in last few days. File them under Get it from Obama or Elections have consequences.

Anytime someone solicits me on the street, this is my response to them. Whenever I get a mail solicitiation (like the one I just received from the local PBS station) I’m sending it back with a sheet of paper that says GET IT FROM OBAMA. If Americans want to transfer control of my money to the goverment, then that’s where they should be going for their handouts.

I was in a supermarket on Thursday and some short hispanic woman asked me if I could reach a loaf of bread for her on the top shelf. I asked her who she voted for. She was a little taken back, but after a few seconds answered “Obama”. I told her “then call the government to help you get the bread down” and walked away.

Danny Lemieux

I would have helped the woman and told her something like, “Just remember, it was a conservative that helped you with that loaf”. Otherwise, I am so totally with you SADIE.

And that includes the Hurricane Sandy victims on the East Coast. This is a FEMA disaster ever as bad as Katrina was…worse, as GW Bush had military help on the way to New Orleans even as the hurricane was hitting.

For a great rant on the Hurricane Sandy situation, read this link from “Phantom” (h/t Small Dead Animals). Then, read all the other commentary:

Danny, add this to the Sandy story. There are approximately 14,000 empty federal buildings in the US. The cost of maintaining them runs in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The feds maintain an interactive website with a list. A handful of the buildings are in NY/NJ (blue states). National Guard + buses + MRE’s/water + cots/blankets…too sensible of an idea for FEMA, who in all their chutzpah waited for bids on water to distribute.

JKB

Hey, I’m sure to the horror and denial of the eeeelite NY progressives, but help for the victims of Sandy has come from :

Among the more entertaining incidents, a crew of chainsaw-toting Baptists showed up and started cutting people’s trees for free. This was extremely necessary, because all tree service companies are booked up solid on larger jobs.MaxedOutMama: Fiat Lux!

I did not see a cop the whole time, but aside from the terror of gangs of chainsaw wielding Baptists roaming around freeing people from their houses, I also did not see the need for them. Mainly it was just people helping people.

From the South, no less. The horror! The horror!

Charles Martel

“Chainsaw-toting Baptists.”

I will have nightmares.

Danny Lemieux

Well, those white hard hats they wear are….raaacist, donchaknow!

Michael Adams

Danny,

My reasoning is thus: We have very little control of the propaganda, but, at least in a passive manner, we can influence events. The media shills will still tell us that what we see tastes like ice cream, but not everyone with a nose will ask for a spoon. Many people, nearly as smart as we are, have pointed out that the Romney brain trust failed even in the simple matter of spending campaign money on, ahem, a campaign, in the summer, in the swing states. The same wunderkinder who spent so much energy, four years ago, on sliming Sarah Palin, were responsible for this portion of the disaster. However, when O’Bama said, over and over again, “We tried it their way and it did not work,” he had an event, even a spurious one, to use in the propaganda. If, four year hence, we can say the same thing, and will actually say it(!) we might make some headway.

Chuck Hammer, I am the counter culture. My kids were home schooled, when they were not in private schools. My grand children are the same. I left a Left church for a Christian one. We avoid movies and television, except NCIS, produced by a card-carrying Republican, with a few leftie sluffs woven into the dialogue. My grown son and I were involved in the massive effort to evacuate Katrina victims, and we give to the Salvation Army and not the Red Cross. I am a member in good standing of my parish’s chapter of Anglicans for life, and we pray in front of abortuaries and support crisis pregnancy centers. I have taken in the children of women who were being pushed into abortion, to allow them to go into the homes of friends when complications in the third trimester put the babies in danger. That’s just a little of it, and I am neither alone nor even a leader in any of these things. I AM,WE ARE, the alternative culture. That’s where these blogs are not just preaching to a choir consisting of only ourselves. The mutual encouragement we give one another is a vital part of what we are doing.